Robert Adams
Anyone who leafs through a family album either at home or with relatives almost inevitably comes across photographs of landscapes. Women are seen standing by railings in front of Alpine panoramas, men pose by their cars at the side of country roads, and children are photographed playing in flower-filled meadows. All that is beautiful and that stands apart from our everyday lives is intended to find permanence in enduring images. As a place of refuge for societies that are organized in and by towns and cities, the landscape may not be entirely at odds with culture, but at least it obeys its own laws. Quite clearly it enables us to experience things that otherwise appear to have long been contaminated by mechanical reproduction. Perhaps this helps to explain why Walter Benjamin defined one of his key concepts - aura - by means of the image of a landscape: 'What, in fact, is aura? A strange fabrication of space and time: the unique experience of a distance, however close it may appear to be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you breathe the aura of these mountains, of this branch.' There continue to be mountain ranges and branches, so that - unlike the impossibility of our experiencing the aura of a work of art - it appears that we can still experience the aura of these objects, a possibility that seems not to have been destroyed or lost. At the same time, however, the landscape, like the work of art, is an object of mass culture, reified as a climatic health resort recognized by the state, or as a well-signposted country walk or as a luxury cruise to the polar sea. In this form, it finds a place for itself in the city, as Alpine milk chocolate, as an SUV or, above all, as a mechanically reproduced image.
Not that this is entirely new. In painting and in the graphic arts, too, the landscape has been interpreted and defined as a culturally determined image dependent on current aesthetic outlooks, some of which are mutually contradictory. But a fundamental change took place in this respect in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although this did not mean that it was no longer idealized, the landscape was now regarded as an object and a place that could be appropriated: nestling idyllically between rolling hills in the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, Richard Arkwright's spinning mill is just as much evidence of this development as the countless prints and drawings intended to reproduce panoramic views of church towers and mountain peaks, views that well-to-do members of the nobility and middle classes would themselves paint and draw while undertaking the Grand Tour.
Jem Southern
The fact that one of the inventions of photography is linked to the production of images of this kind is no accident but is an expression of the afore-mentioned act of appropriation, an act that has assumed many different forms in history. One of these early travellers was William Henry Fox Talbot, who in October 1833 attempted to produce views of Lake Como using a camera lucida, but the results struck him as unsatisfactory. Later he described using a camera obscura and admiring the images which, fairylike in their evanescence, he produced in this way: 'It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me [...] how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!' Several years were to pass before Fox Talbot had mastered the technology needed to put this idea into practice, but in the event only a handful of his early photographs depict landscapes, and, initially at least, little changed after 1839 when, hearing of Daguerre's invention, he published his own findings: in its early days, photography was of little use in photographing landscapes. Fox Talbot's paper negatives and the calotypes or Talbotypes that were printed from them were relatively lacking in contrast and showed few details, while daguerreotypes could not be reproduced. Neither process, moreover, allowed large-format photographs to be produced, and so neither could really compete with the countless images of landscapes produced by graphic artists. They were, however, useful as source material, with the result that in the 1840s and 1850s daguerreotypes were taken on a whole series of expeditions to the American West that were organized privately or by the state. In the form of lithographs and engravings, these images then illustrated reports on these expeditions, documenting the land acquisition of the period.
Olaf Otto Becker
Photographic images of landscapes are found in larger numbers only with the introduction of the moist collodion process: taken from glass negatives, these photographs were as accurate as daguerreotypes in terms of their detail but could be reproduced like calotypes. A further factor is worth mentioning here: the now standard formats of these photographs made them collectable. As cartes de visite they could be kept in separate albums or combined with family portraits, while larger sizes were mounted on individual cards or stuck in albums, landscapes finding their way even into portrait photographs, notably when groups of people were photographed against cliffs, Alpine valleys and delightful pastures painted more or less crudely on canvas backdrops. The landscape in photography became the stage set for a dream dreamt by the middle-class subject who sought to reconstitute him- or herself away from the confines of the city and remote from the masses and the hectic pace of life. In essence, little about this relationship has changed. Quite the opposite: in the hands of amateur photographers, small, cheap cameras have produced untold numbers of the sort of snapshots mentioned at the outset, images that have filled albums and cigar boxes since the end of the nineteenth century and whose formal aspect resembles that of studio photographs, the only difference being that the landscapes that could now be reached by train and, later, by car replaced the painted backdrops that were then disappearing from the photographer's studio. And even if the different technical conditions of digital photography have made interior snapshots considerably easier to take, a glance at data banks of images such as flickr.com shows that landscapes and people striking histrionic attitudes within them continue to be photographed with extraordinary frequency.
Joel Sternfeld
The fact that they are the work of artists does not make the photographed landscapes in this volume any more authentic or any more true than the more or less stereotypical images taken by amateur photographers. But in their desolation, melancholy and even silence they avoid the sense of transfiguration normally associated with landscapes and have become synonymous with nature interpreted as something true and pure. These landscapes are disconcerting places often ravaged by the modern industrial world, their economic attractiveness rediscovered in the wake of worries about climate change. Here the often catastrophic consequences of growth have become the basis of a new industry with whose help the landscape can ultimately be realigned with the images of nature that we already possess. A whole series of images in these pages show regions already occupied and vacated by older industries but not yet taken over by new ones. The fact that they appear so impassive is clearly the result not only of the technical preconditions of photography as a medium but also because they are scarcely distant any longer in our imagination but have all the more readily become fixed as images.
'The unique experience of a distance, however close it may seem to be' - the experiences made possible by these landscapes and the images of them are hardly 'auratic', a state of affairs undoubtedly due not least to the fact that they are neither unique nor immediate. This may perhaps be due to the fact that the relationship apostrophized by Walter Benjamin is beginning to be reversed. Although the foreground details such as the petroleum barrels in Olaf Otto Becker's photograph, the massive green wall of leaves in Thomas Struth's and the spider's web in Jitka Hanzlova's often ensure a sense of distance, the images emerge either as landscapes beneath overarching skies, as is the case with Per Bak Jensen, or along distant horizons, as with Hiroshi Sugimoto. They are like stages on which the old plays were once performed and for which the next plays have yet to be written. The images reveal nothing new, but show something familiar and cause it to become alien even when the scenery is peopled, as in An-My Lê's photographs of the North Sea coastline as an area used for military manoeuvres, while Walter Niedermayr's show ski runs on Alpine glaciers. The photographs in this book present us with landscapes that are brought closer to us, no matter how remote they may seem to be. They could be taken by anyone who thanks to the photo series in travel magazines is well informed about the world and who has enough money for a plane ticket or a car journey and who additionally owns a camera. Instantly available for us to see, the picturesque meadows of the River Li are already beginning to be worn down, their beauty appearing to us to be transient, but not yet a thing of the past, in Josef Hoflehner's photographs.
There is no doubt that a book containing photographs like these is part of the commodification of the landscape. But unlike the photographs in glossy magazines, holiday brochures and publications on environmental protection, they avoid the moralizing tone which, whether inspired by cultural pessimism or by a euphoric belief in progress, places landscape photographs in the service of a good cause, even if that cause is one of relaxation. And unlike the large-scale prints that appear in city galleries and museums, they are not intended to overwhelm the viewer aesthetically and thus recall their models. In book format and through the process of reading, these images of vanishing landscapes open up spaces that the observer cannot enter but which remain accessible to our powers of reflection.
Friedrich Tietjen
Vanishing Landscapes
Published by Frances Lincoln
Hbk, 224pp, £35.00
Friedrich Tietjen is Junior Professor of the History and Theory of Photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.
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